The Biggest Issues of All

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - November 10, 2006

The beginning of November is a time when Americans are accustomed to focus on elections and the various issues that drive them, the economy, the direction of the country, safety and security, war and terrorism, taxes and a host of moral issues that either strengthen or poison our culture.

The Church, however, always begins November by concentrating on even more important issues, the economy of salvation, the direction of one's life, the war against "principalities and powers" (Eph 6:12), the return on the investment of our talents (Mt 25:14-30) and the moral issues that are decisive in the election in which God alone has the vote.

In his Angelus meditation on Sunday in St. Peter's Square, Pope Benedict directed the attention of Catholics throughout the world to these issues which the secular media and many of us, distracted by earthly tasks, concerns or pleasures, tend to ignore.

He called four things to our meditation this month. The first is the need to pray for the dead and to remember that one day we will be numbered among them: "During these days that follow the liturgical commemoration of the dead," he said, it is "an appropriate occasion to remember our loved ones in prayer and to meditate on the reality of death, which the 'civilization of comfort' often tries to remove from people's conscientiousness, immersed in the concerns of daily life." The prayerful remembrance of the painful loss of a loved one, he says, paradoxically brings with it the blessing of making us rediscover the "problem" of death, which gives meaning to all of life, for "death is a part of life and not only its end."

The second is that prayerful reflection on death should lead us to focus on how Jesus responded to this existential human problem. "Jesus revolutionized the meaning of death," the pope said. "He did so with his teaching, above all by facing death himself. 'Dying he destroyed death,' says the liturgy of the Easter season. 'With the Spirit that could not die, Christ defeated death that was killing man,' wrote a Father of the Church. … In this way, the Son of God wished to share our human condition to the end, to open it to hope. Ultimately, he was born to be able to die and in this way to free us from the slavery of death.… Since then, death is no longer the same: It has been deprived, so to speak, of its 'venom.' The love of God, acting in Jesus, has given new meaning to the whole of man's existence and in this way, has also transformed death. If in Christ human life is a departure 'from this world to the Father' (John 13:1), the hour of death is the moment in which this departure takes places in a concrete and definite way."

Benedict's third insight refers to how to overcome the almost ubiquitous fear of bodily death. "Those who commit themselves to live like [Jesus] are freed from the fear of death, which no longer will show the sarcastic smile of an enemy but will offer the friendly face of a 'sister,' as St. Francis of Assisi wrote in the 'Canticle of Creatures.' For this reason, God can also be blessed for [death].… We must not fear the death of the body, faith reminds us, because 'whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's' (Rom 14:8). With St. Paul, we know that, even while we are "away from the body, we are with Christ," whose risen body, which we receive in the Eucharist, is our eternal and indestructible dwelling place (cf. 2 Cor 5:1-7).

The pope's final point is to help us to recall, to fear and to defeat the real enemy. "True death, which one must fear," he declares to a modern world that seems in many places to have forgotten it, "is that of the soul, which the Book of Revelation calls the 'second death' (Rev. 20:14-15; 21:8). Indeed, he who dies in mortal sin, without repentance, locked in proud rejection of God's love, excludes himself from the Kingdom of life."

At a time when the news media are accustomed to focus our attention on a multitude of issues and the choices that stand before each of us, Benedict describes what are the biggest issues and most consequential choices of all.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.